In the wake of the announcement of AOL's planned acquisition of UK social networking site Bebo, Hitwise and comScore issued (sometimes contradictory) stats and information on traffic, visit share, time spent on site and other data for Bebo, MySpace and Facebook, reports MarketingCharts.

According to Hitwise:

• Bebo ranked 4th in a custom category of 55 social networks, after MySpace, Facebook and MyYearbook, in Feb. '08; it received 1.15 percent of all US visits to the category.
• In February, MySpace's share of US internet visits among all categories was 67 times larger than Bebo's; Facebook's share was 11 time that of Bebo.
• Bebo's share of US Internet visits is down year on year: Share of US internet visits to Bebo were down 22 percent in February.
• The average time spent on Bebo in Feb. was 30 minutes and 26 seconds, more than both MySpace (30m 7s) and Facebook (21m 0s). The average time spent on the site is flat year-over-year, MySpace is slightly down and Facebook is up 69 percent.
• 22.15 percent of US visits to Bebo last week came from MySpace.
• Of www.bebo.com's total upstream traffic in Feb., 17.37 percent consisted of new visitors and 82.63 percent consisted of returning visitors.
• In the UK, Bebo is the most searched-for brand (ahead of eBay and Facebook) and has enormous brand equity.

Related data from comScore:

• In January, Bebo had 22.4 million unique visitors worldwide with visitors averaging more than 3 hours and 30 minutes on the site during the month.
• In February, Bebo had 4.8 million unique US visitors with visitors averaging 1 hour and 40 minutes on the site during the month.
• In January, 60 percent of Bebo's traffic came from Europe, followed by North America with 22 percent and Asia-Pacific with 16 percent.
• In January, there were 11.4 million unique visitors from the UK to Bebo - accounting for the largest proportion of the site's worldwide traffic.

Data Tables from comScore

Total Unique Visitors to MySpace, Facebook, Bebo, Jan. & Feb. 2008 vs. 2007:

Bebo Visits by Region, Jan. 2008:

MySpace, Facebook, Bebo Average Minutes per Visitor, Jan. & Feb. 2008:

UK Unique Visitors to MySpace, Facebook, Bebo, Jan. 2008 vs. Jan. 2007: